Little Girl Blue (2 page)

LITTLE GIRL BLUE

“
I
WANT YOU
to know I did not kill my daughter.”

Agnes Carpenter's first words to Barry Morrow were piercing. Set to interview the Carpenter family matriarch, he was thunderstruck as the woman suddenly jumped in front of the family's housekeeper, who had answered his knock at the door. This startling and awkward occurrence interrupted Morrow's introduction. “Yes, ma'am,” he replied with caution. “May I come in?”

T
HE YEAR
was 1984. Hollywood producer Jerry Weintraub had called a meeting with Barry Morrow, a screenwriter whose resume included two recent popular television movies starring Mickey Rooney and Dennis Quaid: the Emmy award winner
Bill
(1981) and
Bill: On His Own
(1983). Both were based on the writer's real-life friendship with Bill Sackter, a mentally challenged man he befriended and saved from the institution where Sackter spent forty-four years of his life.

On Thursday, October 18, Weintraub asked Morrow to write the screenplay for an upcoming television movie with the working title
A Song for You: The Karen Carpenter Story
. “You know, I am just not a fan of the Carpenters,” Morrow told Weintraub, who had managed the duo's career since 1976.

Morrow knew of the Carpenters' music and recalled news reports of Karen's untimely death the previous year, but he didn't particularly like their music. “It was considered elevator music,” he recalls. “I was listening to acid rock, Dylan, and Crosby, Stills and Nash.”

Determined, Weintraub began to cajole Morrow. “All right, listen,” he said. “Here's what you have to do. I am going to give you three or four albums and a great bottle of wine. I want you to go to a room, turn off the lights, drink this wine and listen to these albums.”

Morrow, who admits he had never enjoyed a good bottle of wine at that point in his life, much less a great one, followed Weintraub's orders. “I had never heard her before; I had never stopped to listen,” he says. “I had never heard the sadness and the sorrow and the pain in her voice. I thought when she sang ‘I'm on the top of the world' she was serious. I never heard the undertones to it, the layers. When I heard the guitar solo in the middle of ‘Goodbye to Love,' I thought, wait a second, I never even knew the Carpenters!”

Finishing the bottle of wine, Morrow phoned Weintraub. “I'm in,” he said, “if you still want me.”

B
ARRY
M
ORROW
knew very little of the story he was hired to write. Naturally, one of his first interviews was with Karen's brother, Richard Carpenter, who was ambivalent about lending his name to a film about his sister. He saw the potential for pain in such a production, not only for himself but for his elderly, still-grieving parents, devastated by the loss of their daughter. Morrow found Richard to be extremely guarded during their first meetings. More than anything, he saw the surviving Carpenter as highly protective, not only of his sister's but also his own image and, even more so, that of his family. The interviews were frustrating and at times proved futile. This confused Morrow because he knew the Carpenter circle had initiated and endorsed the project. Even so, he was determined to ask tough and direct questions like “Why did Karen die?”

With little to go on, Morrow relied on hopes that others would offer more information. He prepared to interview Karen's parents, who still
lived in the house where their daughter collapsed. Immediately sensing the dynamics of the Carpenter family, Morrow knew he would have to take things slowly and cautiously. “I want you to know I did not kill my daughter” was the last thing he expected to hear from Agnes Carpenter. “I felt sorry for her that she would have to say something so shockingly direct and have it be the first thing out of her mouth. I realized this woman was very defensive and may have good reason to be. Agnes was still in denial. These were very commonplace stages that families go through or hide from. They didn't invent that level of dysfunction, but it was certainly there.” After an hour spent interviewing Agnes in the living room that day, they were joined by Harold Carpenter, Karen's father, who had little to add.

Morrow began to realize he might never get the story of Karen Carpenter from the Carpenter family themselves. Maybe there was something to what longtime friend and business associate of the Carpenters Ed Leffler had said when he warned him against writing the screenplay for this highly anticipated TV movie of the week. “You have no idea what you're getting into,” Leffler said. “
Good luck
!”

It was Leffler's ex-wife, Frenda Franklin, who became Morrow's primary source for reconstructing the events of Karen's life for the screenplay. After their initial meetings, the two spoke often by phone, sometimes for hours at a time. Richard was not pleased to learn this. For years Frenda had been viewed as a threat to Karen's reliance on her family. “Richard started having really strong feelings about what he knew I was going to write,” Morrow says.

Morrow submitted the initial draft of the screenplay for review in the spring of 1986. “
The first draft just
hung this on my mother,” Richard said in 1988. “I said, ‘I will not have this. I won't, because it's not true.' My mom, she is possessive. A lot of moms are, but she was never what this first draft implied. Forget it.”

Carpenter and Morrow met again to look over the second draft. In exchange for modifications to the script, which included the omission of some scenes in their entirety, Richard negotiated with Morrow. He offered to tell more of his personal story, including an addiction to quaaludes and a brief stay in Topeka's Menninger Clinic in 1979. In return, Morrow was to soften some of Agnes's “sharp edges.”

By July 1987, CBS gave the green light to Morrow's third draft of the screenplay, which meant a picture commitment was in order.
A Song for You: The Karen Carpenter Story
entered the pre-production stage, and Weintraub hired Emmy winner Joseph Sargent as director. Richard Carpenter, by then named the film's executive producer, was still unhappy with the script. “It put his family under a microscope,” Barry Morrow believes. “But that was inevitable.” Yet another revision, dated September 30, 1987, did little to soothe Richard's concerns. Harsh and hurtful words from Agnes were still present. “
You don't know the first
thing about drums,” the character tells her daughter. “Karen, sweetheart, Richard is a musician . . . a serious musician. Don't you see the difference?”

Morrow was adamant that the screenplay's scenes were built on solid facts revealed during the interviews he had conducted, all of which the Weintraub Entertainment Group approved and coordinated. “People in the touring group called Agnes the ‘dragon lady,'” he says, so he was disinclined to further water down her character.

By December 1988, four drafts of the screenplay existed. When a fifth was requested, Morrow refused, and within a matter of days network executives informed him that writer Cynthia Cherbak had been hired to overhaul his script. Morrow was indifferent. “I was busy and happy to do other things,” he says. “Those were heady times for me!” (The screenwriter had also penned
Rain Man
, starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman, for which he won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay at the Sixty-first Academy Awards in 1989.)

Even Cherbak's changes could do little to alter Agnes Carpenter's hard-edged character once the director cast Academy Award winner Louise Fletcher in the role. Known for her 1975 role in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
, Fletcher brought a passive-aggressive slant to every line of dialogue. “I had nothing to do with the casting,” Morrow explains. “Sargent comes in and casts ‘Nurse Ratched!' Louise Fletcher could say a nursery rhyme and give you the creeps.”

Additionally Joseph Sargent fought to convince the network that a virtual unknown, twenty-seven-year-old Mitchell Anderson, was their “Richard.” The choice for “Karen” was twenty-four-year-old Cynthia
Gibb, an attractive character actress who had appeared for three seasons in the original
Fame
TV series. The actress came into the project knowing very little about the story, aside from general facts. “I knew she and her brother were a music team, that they were enormously successful around the world, and I knew their hit singles,” she says. “I also knew she had an eating disorder and that she died of it. Beyond that I knew nothing.”

When filming began in February 1988, Gibb was dismayed by the number of script revisions occurring on the set each day. “On a daily basis we would go to work prepared to do certain scenes,” she says. “We would always have cuts or rewrites. Anything that was controversial at all was either diluted or removed. Because the family was so attached to the project, there was some whitewashing that went on in the telling of the story.”

Working so closely with Richard, filming in the parents' home, wearing the Carpenters' clothing, and driving their cars, the cast and crew quickly came to their own conclusions about Karen's story. “If you looked from the outside in, you saw exactly what happened to that family,” Mitchell Anderson says. “But from Richard's perspective and his mother's perspective, it was completely different.”

Gibb agrees the family's intricate involvement made it even more difficult to portray the complex characters they were attempting to channel. “There were some aspects of Karen's upbringing that I felt had contributed to her illness,” she says, “however, the family never felt that she had an emotional disorder. The family did not believe that anorexia was an emotional disorder that becomes a physiological disorder. Therefore, they didn't believe that Karen had anything other than a weight problem. It was difficult to portray certain emotional challenges that Karen had, because the family did not agree that they existed.”

Richard has always held firm in his belief that the stress of showbiz and an overprotective family had nothing to do with Karen's anorexia. “
What would possess
a woman like her to starve herself?” he asked in his 1988 essay for
TV Guide
. “Some people blame it on career pressures or a need to take more control over her life. I don't think so. I think she would have suffered from the same problem even if she had been a
homemaker.” Richard felt anorexia nervosa was something “
genetic, the same way
talent is,” as he explained to Susan Littwin in a piece for the same publication. “I have no answers. People have been trying to get that out of me. If I had it, I'd give it.”

The filming of a watered-down version of one of Barry Morrow's original scenes, set in 1982 in the New York office of Karen Carpenter's therapist Steven Levenkron, remains vivid in the minds of the cast and crew, even today. “
Have you told her
that you love her?” the therapist asks the family.

The father starts to respond, but his nervous voice is overpowered by the mother's. “We don't do things that way. You show a person, you don't tell them all the time. . . . I don't think you understand our family.”

This pivotal scene, Gibb feels, sheds light on the family's level of denial and unwillingness to fully support Karen's mission to get well. “She was making progress, and her family came to see her,” she observes. “There was no support for the work that she was doing whatsoever. The family was more old-fashioned in their beliefs that ‘normal' families don't need therapy, only ‘crazy' people do.”

“Mrs. Carpenter, go ahead,” the therapist says, prompting Agnes to voice her love for her daughter.

“For heaven's sake,” she exclaims. “This is ridiculous! We came three thousand miles for this nonsense?” Gibb's head drops slowly to the side, her character seemingly ashamed, having burdened the parents with her personal problems. Missing the point, the mother retorts, “We don't need to prove anything to Karen. She knows we love her.”